It will be seen at a glance from the course of this previous history that this law instituted no new principle, or theory, or system in French currency. The decimal system was adopted in place of the old system of livres tournois, seigniorage was abolished, and fixation of value given to the unit money, and billon money discontinued. But in matter of standard and system there was not even innovation. The system of Republican France, as established by this law, was no more and no less bimetallic than in 1785, or than in 1610, or in the days of Francis I. Theories as such did not occupy the mind of the legislator, and of any conception of a bimetallic theory or system such as we have learned to know there is no trace. The First Consul found at hand the two metals which had formed the currency of his country for centuries. The problem of their regulation was the same which had been faced by his predecessors for centuries, and he settled it in the same practical untheoretic way.
It was only gradually that in its totality of coins the French monetary system was made to conform to the metric system thus established. The old gold coins of 12, 24, and 48 livres were not suppressed until June 1829, the actual extinction of billon money was only accomplished in 1845, and the recoinage of the inferior monies in 1852-56. But such are mere matters of detail and apart from the subject.
The experience of France under this new régime is, therefore, in no wise different in kind
> from such experience as has been described for the preceding centuries. It is not until the broaching of a bimetallic theory as such, and until the expression of that theory, as a theory, in the formation of the Latin Union, that anything like a special significance attaches to the monetary system and experience of France in the nineteenth century, any more, e.g., than in the seventeenth. The main difference in the situation was not that France had changed her system, and that her experience was henceforth different and of different signification, but that England had changed hers, and that the brunt of the fluctuations of the precious metals about a fixed ratio was left to be borne by a smaller area. The influence and the instance is, therefore, more telling in degree, but in no way different in kind.
The second idea which is commonly entertained with regard to the action of France during this later period, viz. that her action secured for the world at large a fixed and steady ratio, is equally—indeed, still more—fallacious. At no point of time during the present century has the actual market ratio, dependent on the commercial value of silver, corresponded with the French ratio of 15 1⁄2, and at no point of time has France been free from the disastrous influence of that want of correspondence between the legal and the commercial ratio. The opposite notion, which prevails and finds expression in the ephemeral bimetallic literature of to-day, is simply due to ignorance. From 1815 England has been withdrawn from this action of a bimetallic law, and the modern insular pamphleteer has before his eyes no sign of
its workings in his own country. He therefore assumes an universality of such experience, and attributes it to the French legislative ratio. It is in no polemic spirit, but simply in the interest of science that this particular misapplication of history to the squaring of a theory is to be branded. The plainest facts of history are thereby absolutely misrepresented, and the assumption of cause and effect is so far from being true that the repose of the English currency history in the nineteenth century is to be attributed to the absence of a bimetallic system; to its despite rather than its presence and influence. To instance only by France for the moment.
FRANCE: COURSE OF THE RATIO
The course of the actual or market ratio has been already stated in the table (supra, pp. [157]-[59]). In the graphic representation of this (opposite) the legal ratio of 15 1⁄2 is represented by the fixed line x.y., the actual ratio by the fluctuating black line z. At no point do these lines coincide. After three years of fluctuations, 1803-06, now above and now below, the ratio sinks persistently below for seven years, 1807-13, touching the lowest point (a ratio of 16.24) in 1813. For the succeeding five or six years, 1813-19, the ratio was as consistently above the legal rate, though with less violence and width of divergence. From the latter year, 1819, up to 1850, its course was undeviatingly below 15 1⁄2, then from 1851-67—the period, i.e., of the great
gold outputs of Australia and America—as undeviatingly above. From the last-named date until the close of the bimetallic system in France, and, indeed, up to our own days, the course of the commercial ratio has been again unbrokenly below the 15 1⁄2 ratio, and, as is too well known, with an ever-increasing enormity of divergence.
So much for the claim that the French law has dowered the world with a steady ratio.